Am I dieting too well?

June 14, 2009 3:50 AM

Do I need to eat more?

I'm doing the "hack" diet, finally having grown tired of being circumferentially-challenged all of my life, and it's going great. Perhaps too great? I'm eating a comfortable amount (as in, I don't feel a lack of energy, or unrelenting hunger pains), but a calorie miscalculation on my part in one of my almost-daily meals means I'm eating about 100 calories less per day than I expected.

I thought I was eating between 1450 and 1600 calories a day, and in reality I've been eating between 1350 and 1500 calories a day, with a rough average of 1400 or so. One day a week the calories jump to 1700 or 1800 for a "special" meal, and I suspect I may be eating a few more calories than I think I am, with a cup of cereal really a cup and a smidge or a tablespoon of peanut butter really a heaping tablespoon, etc., etc. Charts show I am eating about 1200 calories a day less than my burn rate.

I had read that a man shouldn't eat less than 1200 calories a day to ensure adequate nutrients (which means I'm probably fine at my current intake), but I've also read that number should be 1500. I have no way of gauging which number is correct.

I'm in my early 40's, 6'1 and reasonably large framed. Aside from being a ball of goo, I'm in good health. I take a daily multivitamin and a fiber supplement. I started the diet just before April 1, clocking in at a well-marbled 246 pounds. As of today I'm at 216 pounds. I'm also following the exercise recommendations in the diet, and have been able to progress with those at a rung per week without discomfort.

My goal weight is 185, and I'll be there in September assuming it falls off as fast as it has. That would be fabulous. I feel fine (better than I have in a long time, actually), but also don't want to do any permanent harm if this is too fast a rate.

So, healthier people than I, is this calorie level OK for the duration of the diet, or should I bump it a bit?

posted by maxwelton to health & fitness (13 comments total)

I did the hacker's diet in 2004 -- from Feb to September, 232 to 190, BMI from 30 to 25 and it worked great but in retrospect I wish I had gone a bit slower since you do lose more muscle the quicker you lose.

So my advice would be to shoot for no more than 1.5 lbs per week of loss going forward. 1lb/week would be optimal from a long-term health standpoint I think.

But 30lbs in 10 weeks is a bit fast but normal for starting out so congrats on that.

You're going to have to maintain a weight too so you might as well develop the habits now by slowing the loss and adding to your daily diet such to hit that ~6 lbs/month loss rate.
posted by @troy at 4:24 AM on June 14

As long as you make sure that you are getting enough protein, there should be no medical issue. A good rule of thumb is to take 80% of your body weight in kilograms and convert to grams. The result is an approximation of the amount of protein you need to maintain Nitrogen balance in your body and not have to break down your muscles for their amino acids. As long as you eat meat, you'll be assured of getting all of the essential amino acids, but if not, make sure you eat a variety of high protein legumes, beans, nuts, whole wheat, etc.
posted by swellingitchingbrain at 5:10 AM on June 14

You should not go below 1500 calories as a male. And even that's low. Additionally, you should not try to target more than a 1000 calorie daily deficit.
posted by smalls at 5:48 AM on June 14

Nthing no less than 1500 calories per day.
posted by jgirl at 7:11 AM on June 14

There is no hard and fast rule. As long as your diet has enough variety and quality to feed the normal operations of your lifestyle, you should be good to go. 1500 calories of crap is worse than 1250 calories of nutritious food.
posted by gjc at 8:33 AM on June 14

There is no way you're going to continue losing weight at that rate - you will probably get hungrier when you have less fat stored.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about it now so long as you're not hungry and have plenty of energy. If you start getting too hungry, absolutely add more calories.

Here is a chart of someone's weight loss from about 375ish lbs to 180ish lbs. The red line is the projected weight loss, the grey line is actual. You'll see that she lost much more quickly than expected at first, and by the end she was losing very slowly. Although you're aiming for a much smaller loss, I would expect that the pattern will be similar.
posted by insectosaurus at 9:35 AM on June 14

The major problem with taking in too few calories is that you tend to lose a lot of muscle doing this. And you are taking in very, very few calories. (I need you to imagine: I am almost a foot shorter, a hundred pounds lighter, and female, and I would probably eat about that number of calories to lose weight. If that doesn't seem at least a little wrong to you...). If you're using any online tracker to help you chart those calories, what does it say about your carb/protein/fat breakdown per day? If the protein isn't reasonably high (I would say for a man your size aim for at least 150g/day and many would say more than that), try to increase that at the expense of carbs.
Don't think of this as trying to prevent permanent harm. There is little you can do that will cause permanent harm so long as you aren't damaging your vital organs. But if your weight loss favors muscle over fat a few things can happen:
1) you get into the vicious cycle of losing weight by losing muscle, so lowering your metabolism a bit, requiring you to eat fewer calories to continue to lose weight, which can cut more muscle, which makes you lower calories even more... and eventually you plateau or start feeling the massive effects of dietary deprivation and give up, and gain the weight back faster than ever before.
2) You might be lucky, and avoid that cycle, but find yourself at 185 and totally skinny-fat, which isn't necessarily healthier than 200 and fatter but fitter. You also can't eat as much as your healthier counterpart because hey, you're skinny fat. You only get to stay "skinny" being skinny fat by eating very little.

You've done great losing that first 30 pounds, it needed to be done and it's fine that you did it that way. My advice is to start thinking about how you are going to start living your life as a healthy person from now to forever. If you think there's a chance you won't want to have to eat this same diet forever, you need to start finding one that you will be able to live with.
posted by ch1x0r at 9:56 AM on June 14

Looks like my protein is a bit deficient, if I use swellingitchingbrain's formula, and most everyone else concurs I should eat a bit more, so I think I'll add another source of protein to my diet...maybe a hard-boiled egg with my lunch, and maybe be a bit more generous with the peanut butter. I'm not a vegetarian and I typically eat one meal a day with meat, so that should be OK, I guess.

I don't necessarily expect the weight to keep falling off as it has, so we'll see when it gets closer to 200 how it's going.
posted by maxwelton at 10:13 AM on June 14

I should maybe add I'm not eating differently than I did before I went on a diet, just less of it. For example, before dieting I would have two sandwiches for lunch, drink way too much sugared soda all day, have one of those "single serving" bags of chips that actually contain two servings as a snack, and hoover in the various baked goods my bride enjoys baking a couple of times a week.

I switched to diet soda (which has the added advantage of causing me to drink far less of it, one can a day of diet as opposed to four or more cans a day of regular), eat recommended servings of snack foods, one sandwich for lunch, etc., etc. I am not a model of good nutrition, never have been and likely never will be, as far as eating only stuff that is good for me. If I could live my life only eating from the crunchy golden brown food group, I would. Part of what appealed to me about the hacker's diet and the reason it's working--and that I can see using the tools to maintain my goal weight--is that I am simply not going to be able to stick to anything that requires me to choke down food I loathe, as stupid as that sounds.

I am going to be fitter (going from never doing any exercise, anything is better than where I was) and I am aiming to be in shape.

Prepare to be appalled: a typical carb/protein/fat breakdown for me is 50/20/30, according to my tracking software.
posted by maxwelton at 10:30 AM on June 14

Congratulations on your success so far. I'm about your age and height and I've gone from 290 on 2/9/09 to 228.2 on 6/14/09. I too owe much of my success so far from limiting my portions (1 sandwich, not two, no snacks from the vending machine) and keeping around 1500 cal a day. Some days I will go as low as 1200 and some days as high as 2200. I try to concentrate on eating more protein so I'm not eating so much yummy delicious carbs. I burn about 1200 cal a day in the gym. To keep from plateauing I've had to mix up my workout routines and diet. One thing for certain is you got to keep mixing it up so your body doesn't adjust to your workouts or diet. Always keep it guessing. I don't deny myself things like migas tacos (just not with a side of chips and salsa or queso) from time to time or other things I want. I just can't have giant portions or have crappy meals for every meal.

I religiously enter my foods into gyminee dailyburn.com but I'm not measuring portions exactly. I just use it as a guide. Whether the food I entered for breakfast today has 540 cal, 500 or 600 is not as important as it wasn't 1500-2000 cal like in the past. I'm eating "normal" portions now and that is what matters. I wouldn't worry about your days when you're tracking and your calories come up light. With your splurge days you're averaging for the week.

Best of luck on your continued success.
posted by birdherder at 10:53 AM on June 14

I am on a 1850 calorie diet and am constantly hungry ... I'm not sure how you manage on 1300 to 1500 but congratulations! I use sparkpeople to track my intake each day. It's a pretty handy way of seeing what you're eating, what nutrients are in the food and also for tracking specific goals such as protein, calories, fat, sodium, calcium, etc. (And by the way, there's some excellent tips in this thread ... I definitely need more protein than I've been getting.)
posted by Happydaz at 11:40 AM on June 14

Max, what you're doing is the only way I ever managed to lose weight, and resulted in a seventy-pound loss over the course of a year. A total, unbelievable change, all without ever really changing how I ate. I did 1500 calories a day, and it didn't cause any health problems that I'm aware of as of yet, and that was more than two years ago.

And everyone here is right; the dramatic cliff of weight loss of my first few months gradually evened out. It's just astounding to watch the weight drop off, and it can be a bit disconcerting. Get yourself up to 1500, and keep at it.

Birdherder, what helped me when I was starved all the time was looking at my schedule; it turned out, I was always hungry at night, when I was totally out of calories. I factored some late-night munchies into my diet plan, and things went much better.

Also, pickles are awesome.
posted by MrVisible at 1:26 PM on June 14

As an amusing aside, I find the information about protein on the web to be some of the most haphazard I've ever come across. I find authoritative sites that state categorically I should be getting somewhere between 40 and 240 grams per day, depending on the site. That's a 600% range. Nice work, web publishers.

I made some adjustments to my daily intake and now I'm getting between 70 and 80 grams of protein a day and eating between 1600 and 1800 calories. (I cannot even imagine what you'd have to eat to get 150 grams or more of protein a day, within a reasonable number of calories that still reflected "normal" foods.)
posted by maxwelton at 11:34 PM on June 15